Jasper Johns : a retrospective : OctoberJasper Johns : a retrospective : October20, 1996 through January 21, 199720, 1996 through January 21, 1997[Kirk Varnedoe][Kirk Varnedoe]

AuthorJohns, Jasper, 1930-

Date1996

PublisherThe Museum of Modern Art

Exhibition URLwww.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/295

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibitionhistory—from our founding in 1929 to thepresent—is available online. It includesexhibition catalogues, primary documents,installation views, and an index ofparticipating artists.

© 2017 The Museum of Modern ArtMoMA

Jasper Johns a retrospective

October 20, 1996 through January 21, 1997

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see

it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains

similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye....

Generally I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions

of simplicity. Everything looks very busy to me.

M(. v p — Jasper Johns, 1959

Seldom have mastery, mystery, simplicity, and paradox been so inseparably

united as in the art of Jasper Johns. The vocabulary associated with his work

_o conjures obscurity and equivocation. Yet even as words like "enigmatic,"

^ "hermetic," and "abstruse" are applied to his art, Johns's working process

revolves around procedures that are more methodical than arcane: hard work,

a5 intense deliberation and experimentation, obsessive craft, and cycles of revi-

_o sion and repetition. Also ironically, Johns's frequent appropriations and

borrowings from works by other artists have only underscored the singularity

g of his sensibility.3a>

^ From the Rural South to New York City

Born in 1930, Johns spent his childhood in small South Carolina towns during

the Depression. After his parents' marriage dissolved, he was raised in the

homes of relatives. With a penchant for drawing yet little contact with any

actual fine art, Johns conceived the ambition of becoming an artist. At the age

of twenty-three, he settled in New York to pursue this objective. He expunged

from his art any resemblance to the styles of other artists and destroyed virtu

ally all his prior work,

though a few early

examples are seen at the

start of this exhibition.

From the mid-1950s,

Johns's work alloyed cool

logic and private compul

sion. His breakthrough

1954-55 painting Flag

instigated a series of

paintings of the American

flag and of targets. When

Johns made these paint

ings, he was interested

in what he later described

as "pre-formed, conven

tional, depersonalized,

factual, exterior elements," and "things which are seen and not looked at, not

examined. " The authority of these works, seen in the first two galleries of the

exhibition, stems from the tension between depiction and the thing depicted.

The colored plaster-cast body fragments set in lidded boxes atop Johns's

first target pictures were intriguing anomalies amid his early focus on flat

signs. His paintings became more complex as he set flags within expanded

fields, placed alphabetical and numerical sequences in grids, and inserted

actual objects into his art, such as books and drawer knobs. These elaborations

expanded into another sphere when he began including words like "The" and

"Tennyson" in his pictures. This early evolution was observed only by a few

artist friends, including the artist Robert Rauschenberg, principal among

them, as well as the composer John Cage and the dancer and choreographer

Merce Cunningham.

In January 1958, the fledgling Leo Castelli Gallery in New York held Johns's

first solo exhibition, which is summarized in the first gallery of this retrospective.

With it, Johns was established as a major figure. Almost simultaneously, a target

painting appeared on the cover of Artnews magazine, The Museum of Modern

Art acquired three of his works, and his art became widely discussed as both the

extension of and an attack on the formal strategies of Abstract Expressionism,

the dominant movement in American art at the time.

First Fame and Forays into PrintmakingJohns's growing focus on process and craft received an impetus from his initia

tion into printmaking in i960. Certain qualities inherent to making prints — the

capacity to create chains of closely related variations on an image, the potential

for reiteration, reversal, and sequential development — were echoed in his paint

ing. Johns routinely painted in a new mode while simultaneously producing

graphic works based on earlier elements. In a tendency that began in 1959, he

used doubled or "twin" motifs in his work. Johns's initial imagery — targets,

flags, numbers, etc. — became less the common public subjects they had once

seemed to be and more the private touchstones of his artistic progress.

By the end of the 1950s, Johns quickly moved on from the hard-edged style

and representative imagery that had won him immediate acclaim. He also com

pleted a series of Sculp-metal and bronze replicas of flashlights and light bulbs,

and, in i960, a bronze of a pair of ale cans. By 1959, he began to cover the picto

rial field with aggressive brushstrokes and clusters of strokes, using the primary

colors, their immediate secondaries (green, violet, and orange), and white, black,

and gray. In contrast to the deadpan reticence of his previous paintings, these

new works featured rocket-burst splashes that some observers of the 1960s linked

to Abstract Expressionism. The new paintings introduced a more layered sense

of space. Now, in 0 through 9 (i960), for example, straightforward grids of num

bers were replaced by the sinuous confusion of the integers rendered one atop

the other. In False Start (1959), Johns introduced cognitive discordance between

actual colors and the words that name them.

A New Emotional ToneAround 1961, a new emotional tone, chill, dark, and bleak, intervened in Johns's

work. That year, titles of negation, melancholy, or bitterness in works such as

No, Liar, and In Memory of My Feelings— Frank O'Hara underlined the altered

mood. The names of colors inscribed in the pictures — red, yellow, blue — slide

out of register, fall down, and refract. Gray, formerly an impassive neutral,

became an expression of mortality and gloom. In a 1963 interview, Johns sug

gested that where his earlier work was more "intellectual, " the viewer of his

newer work "responds directly to the physical situation," with the effect that

paintings are "more related to feeling or . . . emotional or erotic content."

Meanwhile, the inside-out fold of the canvas in Disappearance II (1961), like

the split title in the 1962 Fool's House (which would come together if the paint

ing's surface were rolled around a cylinder), shows a growing complexity in

Johns's notions of an implied space beyond the picture plane. In Fool's House

and In Memory of My Feelings— Frank O'Hara (1961), for example, the appear

ance of hinged sections, diagrammatic instructions, signs, and labels may also

reflect the enormous impact on Johns of the art and writings of Marcel Duchamp.

In i960, with his first explicit image of studio life — a Savarin coffee can filled

with brushes set aside to clean in paint solvent, all cast and set in bronze — the

act of art-making and the physical properties of the painting or sculpture became

central subjects and primary sources of his art.

Working in a newly acquired home in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, in

1961, Johns developed an important motif, the map of the United States.

Rauschenberg had given him a small black-and-white map of the forty-eight

states showing only their boundary contours. Johns elaborated on this image to

^ ^ ^ ^ W n

' W.du h T": :|

..as-- "MP":' T 3 �;

B| iFlag�1954—55� Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted

on plywood (three panels), 42 / x 6oV» "(107.3 x J54 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson

in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Photograph: Kate Keller and

Erik Landsberg

make three major Map paintings, as well as a number of related drawings and

prints. The first is especially colorful and agitated in its execution; the second is

more gray; the last, from 1963, mixes bright and heavily grayed-down hues.

The Body: Fragmented and AssembledTo the right in the next section of the exhibition, the body prints in the

unprecedentedly large Diver drawing of 1963 evoke a solitary figure virtually

crucified in space. The Study for Skin drawings seen nearby were made by Johns

by pressing his own oiled features against paper and then affixing charcoal

to the stain. The outstretched arm in Periscope (Hart Cranej (1963), associated

through the title with the poet Crane's suicide by drowning, reaches with a

thwarted desperation. These raw exposures of his own body and those of others

combine fatality and sensuality in a manner that was to become central to

his work.

In 1964, a trip to Japan provided the occasion to advance his assemblage

aesthetic. While in Tokyo, Johns made the two Souvenir pictures (which include

his first explicit likenesses of himself) and Watchman (using a partial body cast

for the first time since the early target paintings). The latter involves a rumina

tion on modes of visual attentiveness that, as Johns penned in a sketchbook

note, specifically refers to the differences between a "watchman" and a "spy."

Arrive/Depart (1963- 64) , still marked with his painterly style of the early 1960s,

introduced some of the elements now in play; it contains Johns's first use of

the human skull motif, printed directly from an actual skull, and of the screen-

print technique. The summation of this period of work is the programmatic

According to What (1964); consciously lacking a focal point of reference, this

huge reprise of earlier works joins a broad variety of modes of representation

in homage to Duchamp.

According to What. 1964. Oil on canvas with objects (six panels), 7 '4 "x 16 '(223.5 x 487.7 cm).

Private collection. Photograph: Gagosian Gallery, New York

Unsettled and EclecticFrom the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Johns's work became still more eclectic.

His production of paintings slowed while his printmaking flourished. He

became more experimental, using screenprints, photographic reproductions,

neon, and metal, as well as more familiar studio materials. He explored altered

formats and variable scales, and produced some of the largest works of his

career — both spare abstractions and packed, complex constructions with mul

tiple references. In 1967, a painted flagstone pattern that Johns had glimpsed on

a wall while driving through Harlem gave him a new motif, more abstract and

more random in structure than the found schemas and maps of previous years.

The first such image he reconstructed from memory, this flagstone pattern

became the focus for systematic experiments in visual inversion, reversal, and

overlap — experiments he would expand upon in the next decade. Surrounded

Untitled. 1972. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects (four panels), 6 ' Vi6"x 16 'i "

(183 x 490 cm). Museum Ludwig, Ludwig Donation, Cologne. Photograph: © Rheinisches

Bildarchiv, Cologne

by drawings and prints and providing a terminus for this phase of Johns's

career, the painting Decoy (1971) was a memory construction of another order,

convening the imagery of a previous lithograph and a suite of etchings that

had themselves dealt with paintings and sculptures reaching back to 1959.

The "Cross-hatch" PatternJohns's progress has usually been punctuated by large paintings that seem to

sum up a certain line of inquiry. One of these, the panoramic Untitled of 1972,

also served as a point of departure. It dominates the first gallery on the lower

level of the Museum. On the right, he mounted body casts — fragmentary,

eerily clinical, and apparently from at least two different bodies, male and

female — on numbered and color-coded battens. In the middle appear two

panels of flagstone patterning, one in encaustic and one in oil, in an apparent

overlap, such that the right half of the right panel is identical with the left half

of the left panel. Finally, the picture's leftmost section is covered by a wholly

new motif of colored clusters of hatch marks. Johns pursued the combination of

imagery in Untitled in the two-print series shown nearby. While he remembers

recoiling from what he felt was the "stronger, . . . more subjective quality" of the

body casts in Untitled, he continued to treat these and other, earlier figurative

fragments in his arresting Skin body-prints of 1973 and 1975.

For nearly a decade beginning in 1973, the "cross-hatch" pattern first

employed in Untitledvjzs to become Johns's virtually exclusive vehicle of

expression. Johns has said that he glimpsed such markings on a passing car

and knew immediately that he would use the motif. "It had," he later recalled,

"all the qualities that interest me — literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive

quality, order with dumbness and the possibility of complete lack of meaning. "

The motif provided a segment of surface order, which Johns then supplemented

with shifting rules of patterning that are sometimes clearly demarcated and at

other times only discernible by studied effort. The motif's mathematical orders

eventually reached fuguelike complexity.

Johns is rarely discussed as an abstract painter, but his cross-hatch paint

ings, such as Scent (1973-74) and WeepingWomen (1975), are among his central

works and constitute a singular chapter in the history of abstract art. Deployed

in more splayed and enlarged form, the hatchings take on an expressionist energy;

Corpse and Mirror {I974_75) uses their degraded replication — a "blotted" mir

ror reversal — to picture order's decay. At their most complex, in the Usuyuki

(which means "light snow" in Japanese) series of paintings and prints, these

sequences were arranged according to covert topological schemas that implied

curving or spiraling movements in space. All the cross-hatch pattern images

stand outside the standard categories of gestural expressionism and geometric

order, yet they overlap aspects of both. They recall the New York School paint

ing of the early 1950s, specifically the "allover" compositions of Jackson Pollock's

poured paintings, while invoking the previous decade's minimalist sensibility.

Issues of Life and DeathFollowing his 1977—78 traveling retrospective, Johns painted the last of

the cycle of cross-hatch abstractions that he had begun in 1972. One has

the sense in the later works of this kind that the motif's kaleidoscopic

dynamism is locking up, with intensifying rigidity and constriction. The

shift began to occur with the two Dancers on a Plane paintings of 1979-80.

Figurative references and eating utensils are grafted to the cross-hatch

abstraction. Johns has said that when he made the first Dancers on a Plane

painting, he was "thinking about issues like life and death, whether I

could even survive. I was in a very gloomy mood when I made the picture,

and I tried to make it in a stoic or heroic mood." The paintings can be

connected with his fascination at the time with Tantric art. The utensils

in both versions introduce associations for him of "cutting, measuring,

mixing, blending, consuming — creation and destruction moderated by

ritualized manners."

The change in

Johns's work was further

advanced with his explo

ration of the cicada theme,

seen here in the Cicada

watercolor of 1979. The

complex life of this mem

ber of the locust family of

insects involves seventeen

years spent underground,

punctuated only by a brief

mating-and-dying season

in the open air. In 1979,

when Johns pursued the

theme, the insect had

emerged in the eastern

United States. The way the

cicada split its larval shell

to emerge in final, winged

form may have attracted

Johns: different forms con

tained within one shape.

Also arising in Johns's work of the late 1970s were references to Edvard

Munch, a painter similarly haunted by the dance of life and death. It was

from a late, near-death self-portrait by the Norwegian master that Johns

took the title Between the Clock and the Bed (or three large tripartite can

vases, the first two painted in 1981 and the third in 1982—83. In contrast

to the tightly swarming, kaleidoscopic structure of the Dancers on a Plane

pictures, in these final deployments, the cross-hatch pattern assumes its

most open and monumental scale.

Perilous NightsJohns's work took an apparently unexpected turn in 1982, when he was

winding down the cross-hatch series. A proliferation of new motifs

appeared: three-dimensional objects including body casts and literal depic

tions of planks, faucets, clothing, and ceramics that strongly contrast with

the ready-made flat schemas like maps, targets, and flags. Perspectival

space, previously absent from his work, made its first appearance in the

"tilted" empty canvas depicted at the bottom center of In the Studio (1982),

its illusionistic lean inward countered by the very real lean outward of a

wood stick attached at the bottom of the picture.

Dancers on a Plane. 1980. Oil and acrylic on canvas

with painted bronze frame, 78% x 63%"(199 x 161.9 cm),

including frame. Tate Gallery, purchased 1981.

Photograph: John Webb

IN« JPH

!*

Racing Thoughts. 1983. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 48 x 75!^ "(121.9 x 190.8 cm).

Whitney Museum of American Art. Purchase, with funds from the Burroughs Wellcome Purchase

Fund; Leo Castelli; the Wilfred P. and Rose J. Cohen Purchase Fund; the Julia B. Engel Purchase

Fund; the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States Purchase Fund; the Sondra and

Charles Gilman, Jr., Foundation, Inc.; S. Sidney Kahn; The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and

Evelyn Lauder Fund; the Sara Roby Foundation; and the Painting and Sculpture Committee.

Photograph: Geoffrey Clements

With this new space also appeared a changed notion of time: The arm

casts that appear in Perilous Night {1^2), though mottled with color in an

unnatural camouflage of their "skin," are those of a child growing into

an adult. Simultaneously, Johns's pictures started to include "trick" images

from perceptual psychology (a vase, for example, whose stem can be read

as the negative space between the facing profiles of England's Queen

Elizabeth and Prince Philip), which trap the viewer in confusing either-or

dilemmas of interpretation. This focus on the languages of illusion also

included evocations of a wall in the artist's house, complete with fake wood-

grain, drawn with rude simplicity, and images tacked up with shadow-

casting nails — staple devices of the American trompe l'oeil painters of the

nineteenth century and also of early Cubism. These and other trompe l'oeil

devices are frequently contradicted by reassertions of painterly freedom.

Racing Thoughts (1983) includes the same Barnett Newman print as

Ventriloquist (1983), reproduced in the latter in correct orientation; an

image of a jigsaw puzzle showing Johns's dealer Leo Castelli in his youth;

and a Mona Lisa decal. The first of Johns's appropriations in this period

were the pair of armored pikemen who are cryptically outlined at the

left of Perilous Night, which is titled after a musical composition by John

Cage. Abstracted via tracing from a grisaille reproduction of a detail of

Matthias Griinewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512-16), the sinuous

arrangement of these faceless soldiers and the outlines of a foul-skinned

demon from the same altarpiece are embedded in Johns's most densely

layered paintings. Along with the Swiss skull-and-crossbones placard that

Johns also began including in this period, the quotations of the Griinewald

altarpiece, with its references to faith and mortality, profoundly broadened

and deepened the range of possible meanings in his work.

The graphic works gathered in the next gallery recapitulate earlier

motifs such as the Savarin can and demonstrate once again how Johns's

images often start as objective devices and move with intensified self-

awareness into the realm of the subjective.

The Seasons of Life

This periods most ambitious works were the four Seasons paintings (1985—86),

instigated by Summer (cover). These four paintings assemble artifacts and

seasonal symbols to narrate the stages of life and of Johns's own career. Each

shadow falls on a wall of bricks, tiles, or boards that corresponds to one or

another of Johns s residences. The pictures owe elements of their iconography

to a work by Pablo Picasso of 1936 showing a minotaur moving his household

goods in a cart, and Johns's "self-portrait" shadow, which recurs in all four,

was inspired by a 1953 Picasso painting titled The Shadow. The displacement

and splitting of Johns's shadow from picture to picture is another of the

artist s codes for a changing point of view and the passage of time; the strategy

is meant to suggest sliding quarter-shifts, rotations, and circling patterns of

beginnings, endings, and renewals.

In the late 1980s, the art of Picasso emerged as a powerful presence in

Johns's art, similar to the way that the ideas and images of Duchamp had

inhabited so much of Johns's work of the early 1960s. The autobiographical

traces that had appeared in the early 1980s intensified and, in the context

of a new interest in infantile perception and representation, extended into

memories of early childhood. A peculiar disjointed "face" motif dominates

many of the late-i98os paintings. By 1984, inspired by a Picasso portrait of

Marie-Therese Walter from 1936, in which her eyes are displaced to the edges

of opposing breastlike forms, Johns devised an even more extreme image in

which bulging eyes cleave to the corner and side of an open field containing

equally exaggerated "cartoons" of nostrils and lips. The face motif gave rise

to some of the sparest and most open paintings Johns has made, containing

broad, flat fields of color unlike anything in his work since the late 1960s.

These Picasso-based facial features, projected onto a flat rectangle from

a volumetric head, are sometimes shown reprojected onto a trompe l'oeil

hanging cloth.

With an airy, rejuvenated simplicity evocative of children's drawings,

Johns dealt with his own earliest memories of life in his grandfather's home in

South Carolina. Montez Singing (1989), a picture with the light, open space of

a Caribbean landscape, drew its title and a miniature boating emblem from

Johns's recollection of his stepgrandmother, Montez Johns, singing "Red Sails

in the Sunset." Elsewhere, against the midnight-blue background of an untitled

1988 "bath" picture, in which the depiction of faucets suggests a view from

within a bathtub, Johns introduces the motif of several small spiral galaxies.

Turning Sixty

Johns has said that he felt as if he had "aged twenty years" when he turned

sixty in 1990, and he has also jokingly referred to some of the paintings from

around this date as evidence of a "second childhood." The dislocated

Picassoid "face" he had been working with now reminded him of a magazine

illustration he had seen over thirty years before — a drawing, made by a

disturbed child, in which a suckling infant's vision sees detached breasts, eyes,

and a nose free-floating in a rectangular field. He included this drawing in a

trio of identically sized untitled pictures of 1991 and 1991-94, in white, ocher,

and purple respectively. Along with these "regressions" to primal ways of

seeing, the artist's attention to his own childhood was manifested in render

ings of an old family photograph.

By this stage in his career, Johns had become dissatisfied with interpre

tations of his work in which critics had depended heavily on a priori informa

tion to "see" virtually indecipherable motifs like the outlined details of the

Griinewald altarpiece. Realizing that knowing often replaces looking, he

decided to force less prejudiced attention on the transformed, borrowed

image in its own right, independent of its original source. In Green Angel

of 1990, for example, the central motif is traced from an unknown source.

It imposes an organically irregular horizontal shape over the midline of a com

plexly patterned vertical form, in a way that some have likened to traditional

pictures of Christ's body draped across the Virgin's lap. But Johns also inverted

the image, reversed it, and rotated it ninety degrees.

In keeping with the more obvious attention to art history that has marked

Johns's work since the early 1980s, the period saw an increase in traced imagery,

such as the various remakings in 1994 of a Paul Cezanne bathers composition of

c. 1900-05 and the aggressively hued and boldly puzzle-patterned reworkings

of Hans Holbein's Portrait of a Young Nobleman Holding a Lemur (c. 1541).

In the two versions of Mirror's Edge (1992-93), Johns revived the format of the

studio wall with its trompe l'oeil panels of "taped" or "tacked" images: a plan,

reconstructed from memory, of his grandfather's house, where he spent his

earliest remembered years; a "photograph" of a spiraling cosmos; and a globe-

headed stick man derived from the figure of Icarus in a Picasso mural of 1958.

In 1992—95, when Johns conceived a closely related pair of exceptionally

large untitled canvases, these elements, plus the unidentified traced motif, a

cruciform shape from the 1990 etching The Seasons, and the linear contours of a

soldier from the Griinewald altarpiece, were all "laid over" the reversed imagery

of the three-part Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) of 1984. Looking back beyond

earlier "tackboard" pictures like Racing Thoughts (1983) to previous milestone

works such as According to What{ 1964), or the large, four-panel Untitled (1972),

this grand, summary pair of untitled canvases seem newly dematerialized and

synthetic in their weaving together of disparate motifs. Dreamlike in the variety

of their floating juxtapositions, they reformulate and synthesize, in Johns's

sixty-fifth year, the conundrums of picture-making and the concerns with time,

memory, personal history, and art history that have continued to absorb the

changing focus of his eye.

Untitled. 1992-95. Oil on canvas, 78 x 118 "(198.1 x 299.7 cm)- The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Promised gift of Agnes Gund. Photograph: Kate Keller and Erik Landsberg

Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing.

In some instances the new work may include, as a sort of subject matter,

references to the thing that was seen. And, because works of painting

tend to share many aspects, working itself may initiate memories of

other works. Naming or painting these ghosts sometimes seems a way

to stop their nagging.

—Jasper Johns, 1982

Lecture Series

All talks begin at 8:30 p.m. in The Roy

and Niuta Titus Theater 1. Tickets $8.00;

members $7.00; students and seniors $5.00.

Tickets are available at the Lobby Information

Desk. For more information, please call the

Department of Education at (212) 708-9781.

Monday, October 28

The Beholders' Share: Conflict,

Uncertainty, and Change

A lecture by Richard Field, Curator of

Prints, Drawings, and Photographs,

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Monday, November 4

The Fifties Avant-Garde and

the American Interior

A lecture by Thomas Crow, The Robert

Lehman Professor of History of Art,

Yale University, New Haven

Monday, November 11

Dialogue on Johns and the

Modern Tradition

A panel discussion with Merce Cunningham,

choreographer; Barbara Rose, art historian

and Research Professor, American University,

Washington, D.C.; and David Sylvester, writer

on art and exhibitions curator. Moderated

by Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator, Department

of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum

of Modern Art, and curator of the exhibition

Monday, November 18

Panel of Artists

A panel discussion with artists John Baldessari,

Robert Gober, Elizabeth Murray, and

Terry Winters. Moderated by Kirk Varnedoe

Monday, November 25

The Lessons of the Objects

A lecture by Kirk Varnedoe

This brochure abridges texts by

Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator of

Painting and Sculpture, drawn from

the catalogue for the exhibition.

Museum Hours

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday

11:00-6:00; Thursday and Friday 12:00-8:30.

Closed Wednesday, Thanksgiving, and

Christmas day

Admission

General admission $8.50; members free;

fulltime students (with current identification)

$5.50; senior citizens (65 and over) $5.50; children

under 16 accompanied by an adult free (does

not apply to children in groups); Thursday and

Friday 5:30-8:30, pay-what-you-wish

Special Jasper Johns

Admission Packages

For information, please call (212) 708-9480.

Group Visits

Group visits are available by appointment only.

A variety of special packages is available.

To schedule a visit or for further information,

please call (212) 708-9685.

Audio Tour

An audio tour of the exhibition, narrated by

Kirk Varnedoe, with an introduction by Glenn

D. Lowry, comments by artists Elizabeth Murray

and Kiki Smith, the words of Jasper Johns read

by the writer Reynolds Price, and with music by

John Cage, is available for $4.00, members $3.50.

Amplified headsets and written transcripts are

also available.

Exhibition Publications

Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, by Kirk Varnedoe,

with an essay by Roberta Bernstein. 408 pp.,

482 ills., 275 in color. Clothbound $65.00,

members $58.50; paper $32.50, members $29.25

Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews,

compiled by Christel Hollevoet, edited by

Kirk Varnedoe. 320 pp., 50 ills. Paper $24.95,

members $22.45

Available at The MoMA Book Store

The exhibition is sponsored by

Philip Morris Companies Inc.

Additional support is provided by the National

Endowment for the Arts. An indemnity for

the exhibition has been granted by the Federal

Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The accompanying publications are made possible

by a generous grant from Emily Fisher Landau.

Works of art © 1996 Jasper Johns/Licensed by

VAGA, New York, N.Y.

Brochure © 1996 The Museum of Modern Art,

New York

Cover: Summer. 1985. Encaustic on canvas,

75 x 5o"(i90.5 x 127 cm). Collection Philip

Johnson. Photograph: © Dorothy Zeidman